The Truth About Jesus
By education most have been misled,
So they believe because they were so bred;
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.
I am today twenty-five hundred years old. I have been dead for
nearly as many years. My place of birth was Athens; my grave was
not far from those of Xenophon and Plato, within view of the white
glory of Athens and the shimmering waters of the Aegean sea
After sleeping in my grave for many centuries I awoke suddenly
-- I cannot tell how nor why -- and was transported by a force
beyond my control to this new day and this new city. I arrived here
at daybreak, when the sky was still dull and drowsy. As I
approached the city I heard bells ringing, and a little later I
found the streets astir with throngs of well dressed people in
family groups wending their way hither and thither. Evidently they
were not going to work, for they were accompanied by their children
in their best clothes, and a pleasant expression was upon their
faces.
"This must be a day of festival and worship, devoted to one of
their gods," I murmured to myself Looking about me I saw a gentleman in a neat black dress,smiling, and his hand extended to me with great cordiality. He must have realized I was a stranger and wished to tender his hospitality to me. I accepted it gratefully. I clasped his hand. He pressed mine. We gazed for a moment into each other's eyes. He understood my bewilderment amid my novel surroundings, and offered to enlighten me. He explained to me the ringing of the bells and
-- Sunday before Christmas, and the people were going to "the House
of God."
"Of course you are going there, too," I said to my friendly
guide. "Yes," he answered, "I conduct the worship. I am a priest."
"A priest of Apollo?" I interrogated.
"No, no," he replied, raising his hand to command silence,
"Apollo is not a god; he was only an idol."
"Am idol?" I whispered, taken by surprise.
"I perceive you are a Greek," he said to me, "and the Greeks,"
he continued, "notwithstanding their distinguished accomplishments,
were an idolatrous people. They worshipped gods that did not exist.
They built temples to divinities which were merely empty names --
empty names," he repeated. "Apollo and Athene -- and the entire
Olympian lot were no more than inventions of the fancy."
"But the Greeks loved their gods," I protested, my heart
clamoring in my breast.
"They were not gods, they were idols, and the difference
between a god and an idol is this: an idol is a thing; God is a
living being. When you cannot prove the existence of your god, when
you have never seen him, nor heard his voice, nor touched him --
when you have nothing provable about him, he is an idol. Have you
seen Apollo? Have you heard him? Have you touched him?"
"No," I said, in a low voice.
"Do you know of any one who has?"
I had to admit that I did not.
"He was an idol, then, and not a god."
"But many of us Greeks," I said, "have felt Apollo in our
hearts and have been inspired by him."
"You imagine you have," returned my guide. "If he were really
divine be would be living to this day.
"Is he, then, dead?" I asked.
"He never lived; and for the last two thousand years or more
his temple has been a heap of ruins."
I wept to hear that Apollo, the god of light and music, was no
more -- that his fair temple had fallen into ruins and the fire
upon his altar had been extinguished; then, wiping a tear from my
eyes, I said, "Oh, but our gods were fair and beautiful; our
religion was rich and picturesque. It made the Greeks a nation of
poets, orators, artists, warriors, thinkers. It made Athens a city
of light; it created the beautiful, the true, the good -- yes, our
religion was divine."
"It had only one fault"' interrupted my guide.
"What was that?" I inquired, without knowing what his answer
would be.
"It was not true."
"But I still believe in Apollo," I exclaimed; "he is not dead,
I know he is alive."
"Prove it," he said to me; then, pausing for a moment, "if you
produce him," he said, "we shall all fall down and worship him.
Produce Apollo and be shall be our god."
"Produce him!" I whispered to myself. "What blasphemy!" Then,
taking heart, I told my guide how more than once I had felt
Apollo's radiant presence in my heart, and told him of the immortal
lines of Homer concerning the divine Apollo. "Do you doubt Homer?"
I said to him; "Homer, the inspired bard? Homer, whose ink-well was
as big as the sea; whose imperishable page was Time? Homer, whose
every word was a drop of light?" Then I proceeded to quote from
Homer's Iliad, the Greek Bible, worshipped by all the Hellenes as
the rarest Manuscript between heaven and earth. I quoted his
description of Apollo, than whose lyre nothing is more musical,
than whose speech even honey is not sweeter. I recited how his
mother went from town to town to select a worthy place to give
birth to the young god, son of Zeus, the Supreme Being, and how he
was born and cradled amid the ministrations of all the goddesses,
who bathed him in the running stream and fed him with nectar and
ambrosia from Olympus. Then I recited the lines which picture
Apollo bursting his bands, leaping forth from his cradle, and
spreading his wings like a swan, soaring sun-ward, declaring that
he had come to announce to mortals the will of God. "Is it
possible," I asked, "that all this is pure fabrication, a fantasy
of the brain, as unsubstantial as the air? No, no, Apollo is not an
idol. He is a god, and the son of a god. The whole Greek world will
bear me witness that I am telling the truth." Then I looked at my
guide to see what impression this outburst of sincere enthusiasm
had produced upon him, and I saw a cold smile upon his lips that
cut me to the heart. It seemed as if he wished to say to me, "You
poor deluded pagan! You are not intelligent enough to know that
Homer was only a mortal after all, and that he was writing a play
in which he manufactured the gods of whom he sang -- that these
gods existed only in his imagination, and that today they are as
dead as is their inventer -- the poet."
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